Legend of Grimrock

Grimrock's puzzles outweigh the exploration (click 'here' for hidden pathway) and combat (side step, and side step again) tenfold. I get it, the game is designed as a puzzle-based dungeon explorer, but I don't enjoy puzzles in dungeon crawling games as a primary mechanic. It takes all of the visceral excitement out of the game, ruins the pace, and fuels me with anxiety when wasting time on a series of monotonous riddles rather than an 'impassable' series of enemies. Not fun. Shame, I enjoyed it up until the 4th floor. Than it was just, "oh, and here is an entire floor that has puzzles within puzzles, and you're punished heavily for making mistakes you otherwise would have never known to avoid in the first place." Done.

It was fun initially collecting clothing, armor, food and weapons, and assigning them to the most appropriate team member, the game quickly became very tedious. If you go very slowly and painstakingly check every wall, you may find all the hidden buttons you are supposed to, but you'll starve because there is a very limited food supply. (When you're starving, battles are still quite doable but are about 5 times as tedious because your attacks are very weak.) I ended up using walkthroughs to save time and starve less. Some of the fighting challenges rely too much on luck: if you're lucky, the slimes will leave enough of an opening for your team to slither through and maybe survive the fight. Otherwise, reload the saved game 12 more times until they do, then save again mid-fight to try another 12 times to capitalize on that one chance at victory. Tedious. Some of the "puzzles" are rather obscure to figure out, so trial and error becomes necessary, yet they also rely on very precise timing/execution, which is a frustrating combination. Overall, I found the concept and much of the gameplay design to be creative and interesting, but the package fell far short. I quit the game after 6-8 levels.

A lot of people have been voting this down because they don't understand what this is. It's not a shooter, it's not an RPG, it's not a platformer. You don't need reflexes or skill. It's all RNG and turn-based movement. What this is is an old-school maze exploration game with puzzles and RNG combat. Back in the 80s when this sort of game first came out, it was on a top-down grid like an early roguelike, but with more powerful home computers (and I mean relics like the TRS-80) it had pixels aligned on vectors showing the edges of wall, floor and ceiling tiles in forced perspective pseudo-3D, and turning 90 degrees to the right meant tapping the right arrow key twice because there was no mouse support. It's all turn based, and if that doesn't excite you, you won't like this. But for what it is, it's really not bad. Like some of those early games, the puzzles are sometimes impenetrable, and other times require hunting out a loose stone in a wall... that is always in the same position on every wall. There are gear drops and some inventory management, but even calling this a squad combat game is a bit of a stretch. The mechanics are less complex than the earliest Ultima games. But the graphics are modern and very pretty. If you are nostalgic about crowding around a black and white monitor with friends and having to write down clues on paper to figure them out and losing your way because you lost track of how many times you tapped that arrow key, you might really enjoy this. If on the other hand you were expecting Battlefield 1 or Skyrim, you're out of your mind and should probably play this just to learn how far PC games have evolved. It's very old school fun, but if you're used to anything made in the last decade, you may find it tedious and boring. I enjoyed it, but I probably won't play it a second time.

Like many reviewers I've played RPGs since the late 80s. EOB, LOL, Ultima, DM etc were fantastic games because they had great gameplay. I'm playing this on Old School mode and I'm mapping my round first level and I'm in RPG heaven. The difficulty is pitched nicely for the first level which will give newbies to the genre a steady introduction to old school dungeon crawling. Spell casting is a dream and the auto pick up of thrown weapons is wonderful. I love the fact that the developers have kept the food element too. Scavenging is important in dungeon crawling as it keeps you on your toes and makes you keep looking for your next meal. The monster animations are beautiful; I've bumped into the giant snails and just met the mushroom men. They can sneak up on you if you aren't paying attention! Fantastic atmosphere and wonderful lighting effects are just adding to what is shaping up to be a wonderful game. I'll come back and give a review when I've finished the game.

This game is awesome! I've never played this genre before, but now I can say it is very entertaining. The puzzles are hard, but not unfair and the fighting system is intuitive. Good work Almost Human!